maxklein
Joined 19 years ago
Karma
8,686
Submissions
1,893
Member since
Apr 28
You can reach me by email by typing [email protected] in your email client. Blog at maxkle.in. Twitter follow @maxklein
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Comment · 14 years ago
This problem will be faced by many developers soon. The Internet is huge. Very large. The big companies are going to be dealing with huge data. You'll need to understand algorithms and math, and frankly, this stuff is a bit difficult to learn on your own. I thought I knew it all till I went into the algorithms class - that when I realized that not only did I not know it all, I was not as smart as I thought I was, and I would never have had the motivation to go through with this if I had not been forced to. And that goes for many developing.
Programming is a scarce profession now, but the simple stuff will soon be done by too many people. Software will become a real engineering task. In 20 years, the age of the code monkey will be gone.
Comment · 14 years ago
Congrats. Continue in the fine tradition of traditional science dismissing everything that falls outside of known worldview without thinking about or discussing it.
Comment · 14 years ago
Moving to parts of South East Asia or Africa.
Comment · 14 years ago
Tip: Instead of writing the articles via your keyboard, get a good voice-to-speech machine (like the iPad) and simply free-talk about the topic. In 30 minutes, you can write on quite some topics. Totally unique content.
Comment · 14 years ago
But then did not proceed to do so, but instead explained how lack of context in articles generally make them difficult for people to understand. People react too fast before understanding, like most people did on my comment.
Comment · 14 years ago
And why do you assume that I am saying it does not exist? If you are widely traveled then you will understand the difference between articles and reality.
Comment · 14 years ago
I think you misunderstand what I am saying. If you read my comment, you'll see I'm not talking about the content of the article or saying slavery does not exist.
It's difficult to tell people "think before you decide" when the people instantly assume that I am saying something that is attacking them and immediately start aggressively defending their opinion.
Comment · 14 years ago
And that's the correct attitude. I don't say anything refuting the points in the article. I'm not against the article either. I'm pointing out that a single story does not describe a phenomena accurately.
But everyone is jumping on my comment as if I said that anything in the article is wrong.
Comment · 14 years ago
Your search seems to only shows western articles.
Comment · 14 years ago
No, don't believe this. The world is a very complex place, and what makes for a good story is often very different from what reality is.
When American journalists write about the world, they write as if the world is America. Stories are broken down into us vs them, people become black and white, some people are assigned the label 'good' and some the label 'bad'. Everything gets americanised, even the american obsession with skin colour or racial differences works itself into every conflict that is reported on.
Whatever the real story in mauritania is, it's made of centuries and centuries of history, a land caught between the arabs and the africans, a culture that has lasted hundreds of year.
This cannot be captured in a short article on CNN that reduces it all to the archetypal american "black people enslaved by people who are not us". After reading this article, you still know nothing about Mauritania. You have no understand of the complexities of their society. All you have is this single story, this opinion piece by a single author.
Your knowledge is second hand and it's second rate. You do yourself, Mauritania and history a great disservice if you read the article and believe it. A single story should only ever be something that invites you to discover the real history of a place and people (http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_...)
When you read an article like this about Mauritania, don't read it. Realise that it's like overhearing a conversation between two strangers. You lack context, you lack understanding.
That's why you should not believe this story. It's a single story about a place you know nothing about.
Comment · 14 years ago
Such fluff stories were also very common in 1998 and 1999. You never read such stories about car designers, do you?
Comment · 14 years ago
One core difference that I notice between Africa and the West, irrespective of the current development stage, is that people in Africa are mostly optimistic that things are better than the were, and they are expecting things to get much better. So they see the future as being bright and full of opportunities.
People in the west seem to have the opposite viewpoint - the see the past as having been better, and the future bringing doom and gloom. So their outlook is pessimistic.
So there is much more of this lets-work-forward energy in Africa.
Comment · 14 years ago
Paul Graham said. "We're trying to figure out why this YC batch did so well. One theory: they all used Convore (http://convore.com)
What actually made the startups switch away from convore? At the point pg said that, quite a number must have been using it. Then they just stopped?
Comment · 14 years ago
Very faulty logic. 1 in 5 logged in with github, and 1 in 7 logged in with twitter, and this implies you don't need facebook? Measuring two other things does not have any meaning to another not-measured metric. One should add a fb button and then measure how many log in via fb to make such a statement.
Comment · 14 years ago
What about if they made merit not just where you are, but rather how much you have achieved?